1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to domestic furniture, and more particularly to a customized domestic furniture system and a method thereof which enable a user to preview a virtual domestic design combined by an electronic floor plan and a selected furniture kit.
2. Description of Related Arts
During a typical furniture selection process, the customers usually need to preview a combination of different kinds of furniture to assess whether a particular combination of different furniture well fit to their home environment.
Conventionally, there exist two methods of doing that. First, retailers of furniture may provide the relevant customers with a stack of catalogues showing different combinations of different furniture or different appearance of a particular piece of furniture (e.g. different colors for a piece of domestic furniture). The customers may gain a general idea of what the particular piece of furniture looks like in the particular environment shown in the catalogue, and ‘imagine’ the overall effect that piece of furniture has if it is placed in their homes.
The problem with this conventional practice is that the environment demonstrated in the catalogue simply does not match with the customers' domestic environment. As a result, the overall effect of a particular combination of furniture may not duplicate in the customer's home in that each combination of furniture would have different aesthetic appeal in different environments.
Another problem with this conventional practice is that catalogue only displays rather limited number of combinations regarding the domestic furniture so that the customer may not be able to see his/her desirable combination of furniture. On the part of the seller, he/she may need to keep a huge amount of catalogues so that he/she may best fulfill the demand of various customers. Accordingly, the manufacturers of the furniture may need produce a corresponding number of catalogues for showing different combinations of features or aesthetical design.
The second method of previewing different furniture combinations is that the retailer may prepare a plurality of materials samples which are to be shown to the customers so as to allow the customers to appreciate or imagine, from the relevant materials samples, the whole picture of the combination of the relevant furniture.
Obviously, the problem of this practice is that the customers are really hard to extrapolate from the materials samples to form a whole picture of the combination of the relevant furniture. As a result, many people may experience that when the furniture has been delivered to his/her home, the overall effect of the combination of furniture may be totally different from what he/she has imagined at the time when he/she placed the order. In addition, this practice also requires the retailers to keep a large number of materials samples in an easily retrievable manner. This may not be possible for all furniture retailers.
For builders on the other hand, when a particular housing estate has to be built, the furniture combination for each of the, say, apartments, need to be individually selected. The process can be extremely cumbersome: each of the purchasers of the apartments have to be shown a large number of catalogues and then chooses their favorite combination of furniture. The builders concerned must individually collect every single combination of furniture order and then prepare the required resources for building such diverse combination of furniture for every single apartment. As a result, the process can be very inefficient and ineffective. Should there are some mistakes in the data collection procedures or inconsistencies between what are shown on the catalogues and the actual appearance of the combination of furniture, the builders may then be involved in complicated disputes and this may even give rise to legal actions brought by the individual purchasers.